Can a Presley win Mississippi?

Downtown Jackson, Mississippi’s capital, is a ghost town with storefronts boarded up since the civil-rights era and a crime rate that scares locals into staying in after sunset. More people in Mississippi are out of a job and more children live in fatherless homes than anywhere else in the country. Well over half the black residents of the Delta live below the poverty line. Some of those in the state’s richer parts are glum. “When you’re the poorest, sickest, fattest state in America, who wants to bring their family here?” says a retiree in Oxford, a pretty college town.

It is perplexing then that Tate Reeves, the Republican governor, is running for re-election on November 7th on a message of prosperity. He is campaigning on what he calls “Mississippi momentum”, touting the state’s schools and economy. His best selling-point is a statistic released earlier this year: in the decade to 2022 Mississippi rose from ranking second-worst on 4th-grade reading-test scores to 21st-best nationally, a feat that the governor deserves some credit for. He reminds voters that he reopened the state after covid-19, pumped money into coastal industries and cut taxes. (Less is said about the biggest corruption scandal in state history that took place while he was lieutenant governor.)